You don’t have to be a great cultural pessimist to suspect that people who are constantly distracted by digital attention-stealers have a dysfunctional relationship with time. This also applies to its core: the present. The consciousness structures their perception in three-second units. But how much do we actually perceive them? If you want to get closer to the essence of time and being, don’t you first have to be able to pause? Beyond Zack, Click, Push and Update? Don’t you have to be able to endure silence? standstill of time?
standstill. A word that people who are materialistically inspired find just as bad as those who are sensitive to discrimination find the Mohren pharmacy. Standstill endangers prosperity and growth, who would know that better than the top performers in the Munich region, where almost a third of Bavaria’s gross domestic product is generated. Everything has to grow: the population, the number of jobs, commuters, the economy, the size of cars. Many top performers at least consciously accept a standstill: the constant traffic jams on the freeways around Munich or the congestion that they cause with obese cars in narrow streets. The sense of time then suffers, but well, such an SUV has many advantages: it is super comfortable, the physical well-being of the occupants is fully taken care of in the well-padded tin monstrance and in the event of an accident, the others hurt themselves.
Spiritual weal and woe depends – according to the name – first of all on the spiritual, the sublime. We owe the fact that we have this Thursday off to Corpus Christi, an event that draws its spirituality from physicality. With the “Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ” the Catholics commemorate the last supper of Jesus. On the homepage of the Archdiocese of Munich one can read: “The focus is on the message that Christ is bodily present in the Holy Eucharist in this world.” Currently. The sacred power of now. Making the sublime visible. The procession does not stop, but there are occasional pauses. The monstrance is carried through the streets with the consecrated host. In Haar, the move from St. Konrad to St. Bonifatius, unfortunately probably not through Leibstrasse. There is also a procession in Heimstetten, followed by a white sausage breakfast, a sort of Corpus Christi feast.
Incidentally, Luther did not indulge in joy at Corpus Christi. He called it the “most harmful annual festival” and “idolatrous blasphemy”. Modern pranksters like to greet it with “Happy Kadaver”, but that’s based on a misunderstanding: It’s not about the corpse, it’s about licham, “the body” of Christ. It also functions as the bread of life and has also become flesh as a word. For those who believe in it: a present that is 2000 years old.